


The Heterodyne Principle

by englishable



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-04
Updated: 2016-01-04
Packaged: 2018-05-11 18:40:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5637730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They look into one another's minds, that first time, and maybe they can both see themselves reflected there. (He tells her not to be afraid, but Rey decides that he says it more for his own benefit than for hers.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Heterodyne Principle

…

Her mind is a hard, sharp surprise.

He must slip himself like dust through its hairline imperfections – no use of brute force could crack it open. It is clear and purposeful and self-contained, a rough crystal formed by the purifying pressure of things that must be done because there is no one else to do them. 

It refracts time back into itself, making everything a present moment, and so what Kylo Ren sees next appears to happen all at once:

She repels down through the decayed hull of an Imperial Destroyer, her whistle expanding to fill its graveyard silence. 

She stands with her tongue stuck out to catch the rain from a quick-moving squall. 

She builds a stone cairn atop some nameless pilot’s withered corpse, which she has dragged from the cockpit of a starfighter he’d still managed to land before he died, and she spins herself around every tenth step or so to confuse any lingering bad luck.  

She fills her pockets with the yellow-brown flowers growing up through a dried lake bed. 

She scratches clean tallies into a dirty wall, and takes things apart so she can put them back together, and she waits-waits-waits through the night for what she knows may never happen. She binds the last untidy stitch on a doll who has no face. She stands with his father beside a lake and watches sunlight moving off its surface.  

(Then there is an island, green grass and blue-black water below a pale, blank sky, although this has more the texture of imagination than memory.) 

Each one is arranged in close formation, each one repeated over like an image between opposing mirrors, because in each one she has briefly forgotten that she is alone.

It’s deliberate, he realizes. Partially. She bends any thought of the map backwards, refracting it, rendering up these offerings in substitution. The strain turns every nerve in her body to a burning filament. And – 

“Don’t be afraid,” he tells her. He remembers this more clearly than the rest of what his says, since it comes in Ben Solo’s voice. “I feel it too.”

– And something seems to change, as Kylo Ren passes through this bright and unbreakable-steady mind. For a moment it almost shatters him, the way a prism shatters the light into its original parts.

The girl flinches, which is expected. So does he, which is not.  

“I’m not giving you anything,” she says.   

“We’ll see.”

…

It’s this single careless statement that lets her in, Rey will realize later.

No doubt he meant it as simple mockery, but a lifetime of haggling for her pay has taught her the finer aspects of semantic manipulation – after all, the future tense admits some possibility of failure.

She drives herself straight through the gap.

His mind refuses shape or form, writhing with chaotic potential like a nebula. It threatens inward collapse beneath the weight of its own gravity. It pulls things into itself, throws other things out, replacing one with the other in whirling succession. Deception is apparently its only defense. 

_Don’t be afraid_ , he’d said, _I feel it too._

So here is what rushes up to meet her:

He is a boy of four who walks about on his toes, with a solemn trepidation, and explains to his mother that it’s because everything is alive: stone pathways, glass windowpanes, the unrefined earth inside of iron and steel, ghost-stars that died a millennium ago but are so far away that nobody knows it yet.  

He is a boy of seven who sits atop huge and coarse-haired shoulders, unsmiling, in hopes that the added height will give him a more objective viewpoint. 

He is a boy of ten who shuts his eyes whenever his father’s ship heaves itself up to lightspeed, though the acceleration still turns his spine into a tuning fork. 

He is a boy of thirteen, staring at a stone he has broken in half with the hammer of his temper, and he turns to see a change come through his master’s watching-waiting eyes. 

He is a bare-faced man of twenty, and has forgotten his lightsaber can be switched off, because instead he kneels to lower down the stranger he’s just killed. 

He is a boy once more, or maybe still a man, his face tensed with the violent, suspending effort of trying not to cry.

Then he becomes the creature Rey sees now, hooded and masked and holding out a twisted helmet as he waits-waits-waits for it to give him something he is not quite certain he wants. 

All these memories are points spread far apart, with a lifetime of space between each one, because in each one he’s deceived himself into thinking that he is alone.

(A student, Han had called him. A student of Luke Skywalker who turned to the Dark Side.

Of course.)  

Rey pushes against the restraints.  She watches him step away in response, as she’d suspected he would – though for a moment his mind pulls at hers, a deep and insistent draw towards its half-formed but holding center.

Then she forces herself to picture one bright, blinding flash, lighting up all the dark and hollow places inside of them both. 

“You –” she says, through her teeth. “You’re afraid – that you will never be as strong as – Darth Vader.”

He rushes from her mind without touching anything else, so quickly she almost doesn’t notice him go. And as he snatches back his hand, as he exhales one long-rattling breath, Rey thinks she can see the boy’s unguarded face again before it vanishes.

(Maybe leaving the mask in place would’ve been wiser, on his part, but they both know it’s too late to change anything now.)

…

**Author's Note:**

> The heterodyne principle is a radio signaling process that deals with crossing and combining frequencies. It’s what allows a theremin to operate; the theremin is an electric instrument played by moving your hands closer or further from its two antennae, respectively, which are responsible for frequency and amplitude. Mastery is about harmonizing and negotiating the empty space between them.
> 
> (And if you get the reference, you’re in the same position I am.)


End file.
